Annie Mole's, webmaster of Going Underground, daily web log (blog).
If you like this you'll LURVE One Stop Short of Barking, THE fun and informative BOOK about travelling on the London Underground.
Last week's was easy, if you lived or worked in the area, it was fairly obvious. However, if you didn't, there was enough in the picture to make you think it could have been around King's Cross.
This week, I think, will have you puzzled. It was sent in to me by Jim Bleasdale. There's no prizes for getting it, just the satisfaction of knowing you were right.
Try not to look at the comments in front of you before making your guess. Have fun!
Possibly with thanks to the News of the World phone hacking scandal, you're going to see and hear more from the papers, radio, blogs and websites about the 6th anniversary of the July 7th London bombings on our transport system. This time six years ago, I was blogging virtually every half an hour trying to keep people informed. Then for about two months after that horrible day, virtually every day's post was about the aftermath and our attempts to get back to normality on the London Underground.
Normality happened. Not overnight obviously, but we gradually began to stop looking suspiciously at people with rucksacks, or beards, or men of a particular race. We stopped having a fast beating heart each time a train got stuck in a tunnel. Numbers of police on the Tube gradually dwindled. Eventually, we began to relax and our normal moans about the Tube were more about overcrowding, signal failures, delays, Oyster card problems and not about the worry whether we'd actually arrive at our destination in one piece.
I blogged in the past how July 7th 2005 changed me in a variety of ways, I still count my lucky stars that I'm alive and able to travel on the Tube with as much nonchalance, freedom and mobility as most other commuters.
Today, many people will remember the 52 people who were killed. The permanent memorial in Hyde Park will be the focus. There will be a service to remember the dead from 1pm to 2.30pm, organised by Survivors of Terrorism and the Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Foundation for Peace. Floral tributes will also be placed by relatives and friends of the dead at the five sites of the bombings.
Let's hope that today, will not be marred by the actions of some people who do not deserve to sleep well at night. We rose above the terrorists, we can rise above people who go to extreme lengths just to create a front page story.
This should be a day to remember those who lost their lives and also a day to support all those who were seriously injured, both mentally & physically. Ordinary travellers, whose normal Tube or bus journey turned into their worst nightmare. Please take some time out today to think about them and their families.
I would love to hear your memories of Tube travel at the time, or if you have any personal thoughts on July 7th that you'd like to share. Thank you.
It's particularly sad for this news to come the day before the anniversary of July 7th - when 52 people lost their lives and so many others were injured in the terrorist bombings on the London Underground and a London Bus.
The BBC report "Clifford Tibber, a solicitor representing some of the relatives of people who died in the 7/7 bombings, said one family had been contacted and told that their phone may have been hacked back in 2005.
Graham Foulkes, whose son David died in the Edgware Road blast, told the BBC he was contacted by officers on Tuesday after his details were found on a list as part of the police inquiry in hacking claims.
Mr Foulkes, of Oldham, Greater Manchester, recalled how his family had waited for a week after the 2005 attacks for news of David.
"My wife and I were kind of all over the place, we were chatting to friends on the phone, in a very personal and deeply emotional context - and the thought that somebody may have been listening to that just looking for a cheap headline is just horrendous."
Doubtless people will be speculating and discussing this all day. Politicians are already holding an emergency debate in the House of Commons today. Advertisers are pulling their ads from the News of the World, others are reviewing options or waiting the outcomes of police investigations. There have been allegations of payments to the police.
The whole situation is dirty, hideous and makes me incredibly sad and annoyed. If it makes me feel that way, one can only imagine how the families of the victims of July 7th are feeling.
My thoughts are with them even more today and will be with them tomorrow.
I love their "Press Conference" video where Marc explains the months of planning, "lots of Microsoft Excel and playing around with maps". In the video he tries to make the challenge look as "sexy" as possible, which is some mean feat. He said: "Ironically in order to make the journey fast, I had to avoid using Tube trains and a lot of commuters would agree with that strategy."
The end is a classic. When asked why he did this, with true Mancunian wit, Marc said "It was either this or try to get 40 mates into a a mini. You've seen the video and I'd probably struggle to find 40 mates to be honest".
I wonder how LU decide which bands are going to be popular enough to deserve a temporary Tube station sign?
I saw the sign above at Old Street Tube. Old Street, really? I wouldn't have thought that this "hipster" territory was going to be crawling with a mass of Take That fans. But maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps all the queues of people, that look like they're auditioning for the next season of Skins, I see at nearby XOYO music venue, are going to secret gigs for Take That tribute bands.
My friend Jemimah Knight's Tube was delayed on Friday night and she asked on Facebook "If the code for fire on the Tube is Mister Sands - or similar - what's the code for girl-fight? My journey was delayed due to female scrapping." I wondered if they were Take That fans who according to some reports are fairly rowdy & "worse than football fans". So maybe this was another reason for the Tube sign? Maybe London Underground were trying to pre-empt fights caused by their potential anger at facing long queues?
After correcting her that it's actually "Inspector Sands", there were a number of suggestions as to what the code for "girl fight" on the Tube might be. Amongst them, Paul Clarke suggested calls for "Inspector Campbell or Inspector Cole". I thought asking for "Inspector Vicki Pollard" had a nice ring to it.
It's a Victoria Line Tube train fronted with historical signage to mark the 1967 stock making its last ever journey (Bloo Phoenix has more photos of its last journey and many other photographers were out in force).
I love that this "old" train is pulling into a station with a poster for "Lesbians" emblazoned across the platform. The 1960's meets the 21st century. Mary Whitehouse would have been so proud.
Update: Geofftech has made a video of the last journey of the 1967 stock, with passengers opinions of the new Victoria Line stock:
If you know the area, this one is pretty easy. But I'm banking that a number of you looking at this right now won't! Obviously I'll be proved wrong and the first person to comment will probably know where it is.
Anyway, if you're guessing, try not to look at the comments before when you make your guess. Thanks!
July 1st 2011 sees the launch of a new exhibition at London Transport Museum. Sense and the City runs until 18th March 2012, and "explores how emerging technologies are changing the way we access and experience London and compares this with past visions of the future." I was lucky enough to be invited to the preview last night and knowing the readers of this blog, it will be right up your street, with a perfect mix of new and old technology, interactivity, geeky stuff and London Transport.
I loved looking at predictions in the past, for what our travel would be like now, or even in the 20th Century. Rhian Hughes, 1990's take on space hero Dan Dare from the fifties was on display. Dan travelled in a future London, but still used the London Underground with the trains looking pretty err.. different, although the carriages still have the old knobbly ball straphangers.
A monorail running over Regent Street was proposed by the GLC 44 years ago to try to ease congestion. Looks quite similar in a way to the Thames cable car plans in North Greenwich for next year. The image on the right looks like it could have come straight out of Tron, but is actually Barclay Shaw's "Train of Tomorrow" and inspired by design aspirations for the trains of the 1980s.
Above is a wonderful image of "Robot Railroading" predicting "future trains will be fully automatic - robots that can regulate their own speed and control their own movements to meet the most precise schedules". This was by visual futurist Arthur Radeburgh created 51 years ago as part of a weekly comic strip. Driverless trains already run on the DLR and recurring discussion of the prospect of having driverless trains on the Tube is quite familiar today (especially in times of Tube strikes).
A press button route indicator was installed at Heathrow Central London Underground station 34 years ago. "This nifty journey planner" incorporated TV screen displays and a diagrammatic route map. Only one was ever built.
There's a great interactive section looking at the development of technology and its integration into the social, economic and political fabric London.
"A centre piece of the exhibition is an interactive table with eight screens that allows visitors to view a wealth of film, animations, data visualisations and images on subjects ranging from the cashless society and driverless cars to reactive buildings and augmented reality. Visitors will be invited to join in and give their views about whether the plethora of new digital information and opportunity for access is exciting, a huge worry or a total waste of time."
The exhibition was produced with in partnership with the Royal College of Art and students from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London have also contributed their ideas for data visualisation and how technology could change how we communicate while on the move.
I liked the idea of "The Window" (pictured above) where the "obtrusive presence of CCTV surveillance" on the Tube, is transformed into an "interactive action" allowing commuters to communicate above and below ground.
Getting this close to a Sinclair C5 is worth the price of entry alone.
Entry to the London Transport Museum is: Adults £13:50; Concessions* £10. All individual tickets purchased after 20 October 2010 now allow unlimited admission to the museum for a 12 month period from date of purchase. More details and opening hours are here. Make the most of your ticket, I'll certainly be back for a few more views of the wonders on display at Sense and the City.
The topographical distortions of the London Underground map got into the news again a couple of weeks ago, thanks to Metro and the Daily Mail. The headlines distorted the story even more than the map distorts reality. We were warned that 30% of journeys were inefficiently planned, but that’s false. 30% of carefully selected special journeys trick people (a minority of people even then), most journeys on the Underground map are planned just fine.
Even so, the geography brigade are back in action. So, should the Tube map be topographically accurate?
If designing a topographically accurate map was easy, and the result looked nice, then we would have one. This alone should make people pause for thought. The London Underground is so dense in Central London, and so far-flung out into the suburbs that a scale map would be absurd. Even with the extremities of the Central and Metropolitan Lines cut off, it would need to around 1m by 1m, and even then the centre would be unreadable.
What alternatives are there? We can distort the map, squashing the suburbs in a bit, which is exactly what Henry Beck did. The problem is that if such a map is going to be informative, this has to be done properly. Everything has to be scaled and squashed correctly.
Rather than leaving the designer to work out how to squash everything accurately, we can try a mathematical transform using Photoshop. First, get your topographical map.
Now have a play with the "Pinch Distortion" filter (try the sphere distortion too, but the results are too freaky for our purposes). Set this to around -60% (see the image above), and you have a good enlarged centre, with recognisable suburbs. Where you centre the map makes a difference, but around Tottenham Court Road/Oxford Circus is a good choice.
Now, some people think that straight lines are special when designing network maps (especially 45-degree ones) so we can’t possibly stop with this messy version. Note though, London’s slight tilt. This will make the Central Line look like a flight of stairs, so 12-degrees of rotation clockwise (see above) will put this right.
Now we can create our Beck-rules schema. Bingo.
This map is not topographically correct, but it is the best you can get with reasonable size. I call this sort of design "spatially informative", look at any small section of the map, and all the stations are roughly in the right place and the correct distance from each other, but because the scale expands steadily going outwards, some care is needed. Watford to Watford Junction is not as walkable as Temple to Holborn.
Even so, I’ve still needed many compromises to schematise the transformed map (look at the Wimbledon branch of the District Line). An absolutely true schematic would have looked even worse, more zig-zags than the Paris Metro map.
Now we have a map that will stop people going from Paddington to Bond Street via Notting Hill, but it’s not a very nice design, with too many corners. The chaotic reality of the London Underground doesn’t translate directly into Beck’s rules very well. I would argue that the benefits of this map (no more errors for one or two rogue journeys) are outweighed by the costs (it looks ghastly, and it will be harder to use than a well-designed non-topographical map).
The whole point about a schematic map is it takes the complexities of reality and turns them into simple straight lines. Taking the curves of reality and turning them into a pile of zigzags simplifies nothing, the shape of the complexity has merely been changed. But I’ve never wanted to force a one-size fits all map on everyone. If anyone wants to use this map, I’m not going to stop them.
People who have been to my exhibitions will know that I argue that different map design rules suit different networks. 45-degree diagonals are adequate for London, but 60-degree ones might be better. It might be that a different set of angles will tame this map, but caution is required. Use too many angles on a map, thoughtlessly apply them, and there is a risk that it’s visual coherence will break down, and something really frightening could result.
I did have a go at a spatially informative all-curves map, trying to tame the ferociousness of the straight-line version, and focusing on key locations rather than slavishly following topography everywhere.
It’s not my favourite, and needs some more work. Curvy Tube map looks far nicer, even though it is not so topographically accurate, and it will still discourage people from going from Notting Hill to Bond Street via Notting Hill, which is where we came in.
A Tube passenger was decapitated when he fell while standing between two carriages trying to have a cigarette. He opened an emergency door on a Metropolitan Line train at 1.30am on Saturday and stepped out to light up in the gap between his carriage and an adjoining one.
He fell onto the line and was dragged by the train travelling at 80km/h and his head was severed from his body.
A Tube worker who was on the train said: "A passenger was smoking between the carriages. He slipped and fell on to the tracks while the train was moving at 50mph. He was decapitated. This shows just how dangerous messing around between the carriages is.
"If this guy had waited ten minutes he'd still have been with us now."
From the report in MSN's news, BTP (British Transport Police) believe his death was an accident and are not treating it as suspicious.
I am so not walking between carriages any more. It's interesting that this is actually illegal on the subway in Chicago. (Update: Heard from BTP that it's breaking a bye-law here too "Byelaw 10, part 3, states, "No person shall open a train door, or enter or leave any train, while it is in motion or between stations.") Be careful and don't take risks to try to save time or flout safety rules.
Mark said of the Udder-ground roundel: "Point of interest: Glastonbury had a railway station up until Beeching Cuts when the line connecting it to Shepton Mallet was closed. Local shoe industry (Clarks?) used it to freight goods to Bristol docks for export.
The old track bed runs right through the middle of the Glasto site & was used 24 hrs a day by festival goers to schlep between different areas if the site (ironically probably 'carrying' more people per day than the time when it closed as a railway!)
The Moo station bin was situated within site if the old line - possibly without the painter of this amusing pastiche graffiti even knowing of the rail connection just metres away!"
TfL were in discussions with a wine brand, Oxford Landing, who wanted to re-name Oxford Circus Tube and run a whole lot of "ambient" branding inside the station turning it into "a virtual vineyard".
Oxford Landing offered TfL a rather large amount of money in order to do this for a three month period over the summer however, TfL knocked back the idea. But, they did offer to allow the project for a fee described as 'unworkable' by Oxford Landing.
"We were offering a shed-load of money but the number they came back with was 20 times the amount," said Negociants' (the wine's UK distributor) managing director Simon Thorpe. "We were going to invest significantly in the network and thought the funds would be a welcome boost."
The powers that be at TfL admitted informal discussions took place over Oxford Landing's plans, but told The Grocer it does not allow companies to rebrand stations.
"Does not allow companies to rebrand stations". Really? Mmm this is very weird. What happened to the statement back in 2008 where TfL announced they were lifting a ban on Tube station sponsorship? I've seen tons of branded station take-overs (in fact there's a section on Station domination on Transport Media's website - "Available in several stations across the network. The brand owns the station with opportunity for a branding exercise. £70,000" h/t IanVisits) - so I think the definition of "rebrand" is negotiable.
If companies are not allowed to rebrand stations, why did TfL even have discussions with them in the first place? Why then come back with the classic negotiation tactic of deliberately offering a sky-figure that you know won't be accepted? We know that TfL usually get worked up about Tube Map Mashups because of intellectual property & customer confusion issues - can you imagine how confusing it might be for tourists to see Oxford Landing station?
You might remember there was a bit of a PR problem for Boris last year, when many people, including MPs and London Assembly members, were offended by online loan company Wonga sponsoring free Tube travel on New Year's Eve.
Which leads to the following questions: Is it right for TfL to not allow rebrands of Tube stations or should they be welcoming additional funds and investment from marketers? Would you welcome more ads if it meant that fares weren't increased every year or there was an improvement to the service? Does it, or should it, depend on the advertiser?
Admittedly TfL have a duty of care to protect vulnerable or young commuters from seeing ads that could cause offence or be upsetting. This wasn't the case with Oxford Landing, but we have seen TfL take sometimes surprisingly puritanical attitude with their position over what ads on the Tube are acceptable (and have taken a number of U-turns & re-working on their initial decisions - see the related posts below).
Let us have your thoughts in the comments. Thanks.
His profile said "Sometimes I play guitar." What a hero. I love this. I love how he went to the trouble of finding an empty part of the Tube carriage. I also bet people at the other end, didn't even react to his great pose. Unless they thought he was an unofficial busker.
Hat tip to @KatyBeale who created the very wonderful Things People Post on Dating Sites. There are some classics in there (this one's amazing), perfect for Friday laughs! (WARNING - Some may not be safe for the office if your office doesn't like you looking at large cleavages).
He found that Jim Dale (yes him out of the Carry On films) had recorded a rock and roll song in the 1950's as an ode to the Piccadilly Line. It rocks! From the rumbling of the Tube pulling in. To the lyrics. A man is asked to show his tickets going through the gate & sings: "I got a season, I got a season, oh yes, a season". He's let through and our hero gets on the escalator, turns round and shouts back: "I fooled you, I fooled you, I got a four'penny, I've got a four'penny, oh yes, I got a four'penny".
I particularly love other gems like: "I may be right, I may be wrong but a trip on the bus takes far too long." and "If I could travel that line for free I'd be on that train for eternity".
Now the oldies amongst you (sadly that includes me) might think that this song sounds familiar.
I racked my brains and realised it's almost a carbon copy of skiffle star Lonnie Donegan's more famous "Rock Island Line" about the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad.
But well done Jim for putting the London Underground and the Piccadilly Line on the rock and roll map.
If you have a favourite London Underground song - let us know in the comments.
If you know the London Underground reasonably well, there's enough clues to work it out. Try not to look at the comments or the Tube map before guessing!
If I find other good un-tagged photos in the group, I'll keep this up and will try to find ones with fewer clues (but hopefully not so few as to make it impossible to guess)!
"The magic, mystery & sometimes maddening shortcomings of London's Tube are documented with love, enthusiasm & sometimes despair by its unofficial social historian." The Guardian
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